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The customer said he had a Lester piano and a key was stuck down, so I prepared him for the broken plastic elbow job. The GPS location showed a marina, so I called for directions.... "oh, we are at slip 27, come on in". I arrived at the houseboat to find a Lester Mini Piano with a key broken at the key button - an easy fix. I raised the pitch to 440, but some of the pins are barely holding, so I sold a pin tightening job. This piano is so light, no piano tipper will be needed. I'll simply lean it down on a 2x4. They take the boat out about once a month. They bought the piano for $50. The wife, a retired singer will be the player.

Thanks for the info, Sparky, but Coral Snakes are common in my neighborhood. They are not very reclusive here, as sightings around homes are common. There are plenty of other non-poisonous, vermin killing snakes here, and we welcome those with open arms. A Coral snake bite will put a person in the hospital for a few days - they are the most venomous snake in Florida and one of the most toxic in the USA.

Anti-venom is no longer made, and current stores of anti venom expired last year.

Thanks for the info on the local snake situation there Bob.I wonder why it is that they stopped making coral snake anti-venom?I just assumed that hospitals would keep a supply of the anti-venom for whatever poisonous snakes populate the area.(However being in Canada with no real poisonous snakes here, except one fairly rare rattler, I'm not too knowledgeable about the anti-venom policy of hospitals.But thanks for being considerate to the good snakes out there.

I got into the machine shop today, and used the lathe to make the missing strike point adjustment screws for the Knabe. Brought them home and put them in, they seem to fit and work fine. Matthew, my tuner, will be here Thursday to tune it. Thanks again to John Pels for the photos and info that enabled me to reverse engineer the parts.

First a 50 cent pitch raise on an old Gulbransen console that also needed some Protek on the action. After that, picked up a spinet action for an elbow job. From there, off to a music store where one teaching studio had no sustain, and another had 8 notes in a row going down at once. After replacing the sustain pedal trap spring and fishing a pencil out of the other action, those were fixed. From there, an at pitch tuning on an old Mellor upright. Finished the day with a 175-cent pitch raise on a 1936 Kimball studio upright. THAT was a good one to usher in the weekend with!

Some time ago I tuned a piano that the owner had tried to tune. She had pulled the middle string of B3 up by a perfect fourth, so that it was 5 semitones higher than the intended pitch. Yes, really, it was a perfect fifth above A3. Surprisingly the string didn't break. She had tried to tune the piano herself, but she didn't use mutes and didn't realize she has to tune one string at a time. She said that after she had changed one string it got blurry, she got lost and that she probably got it wrong.

I broke the last string on the middle section twice on the same piano, I had to tie two knots before it would hold.

What gives? How come she didn't break a string, but I broke one twice...

The Yamaha dealership here, brought LeRoy, Mark Wisner (while he was still at Yamaha) and someone else into town, 3 different times, cramming the 5 day course into a 3 day course. I went to 2 out of the 3 and said, man, that's enough for me. You're WHIPPED after those 3 days of intensive class training!

The first time I ever adjusted one of the LED lights for the pedals, I busted it off. Mark said, that's okay, we have additional ones here. But, DON'T DO THAT AGAIN!!! I giggled and didn't touch it after that! But, back he comes and made me adjust it again so I would get the hang of how little pressure to put on it.

Maybe she wrung out the wires to the point where they had no more give...

1. I'm saving it for my kid.....Guy's kid was going off to college. So, he reached into the piano with a small socket and turned EVERY tuning pin flat. Removing all the tension on the strings....so it wouldn't 'wear out' while kid was at school. I was called in when the kid was coming back for Spring Break (duh!), and faced a piano with no tension on the wires, coils blown apart by zip-tension, string alignment blown, a couple wires that had hopped off the bridge pins, etc. etc. That was a 'tuning' that turned into 4 hours of effort! But, all went back into place, and we had a nice chat about 40,000lbs of string tension and proper maintenance (including a quick follow-up, that first tuning wasn't going to stay put for long!). Now a regular customer.

2. I'll never tune this thing again.......Tuner in Portland was called in to 'fix' a piano. The owner had called in a tuner, sometime in the past, and decided they didn't like paying for a tuning every year. Solution? WELD THE TUNING PINS IN PLACE. Yup..a small spot-weld at the base of each tuning pin. A blob of metal from pin to plate. Really special, don't you think? Didn't really weld it, as the tuning pins responded to the hammer right away...but it's the thought that counts, right? Who needs a tuner when you have a welding torch, eh?

1. I'm saving it for my kid.....Guy's kid was going off to college. So, he reached into the piano with a small socket and turned EVERY tuning pin flat. Removing all the tension on the strings....so it wouldn't 'wear out' while kid was at school. I was called in when the kid was coming back for Spring Break (duh!), and faced a piano with no tension on the wires, coils blown apart by zip-tension, string alignment blown, a couple wires that had hopped off the bridge pins, etc. etc. That was a 'tuning' that turned into 4 hours of effort! But, all went back into place, and we had a nice chat about 40,000lbs of string tension and proper maintenance (including a quick follow-up, that first tuning wasn't going to stay put for long!). Now a regular customer.

2. I'll never tune this thing again.......Tuner in Portland was called in to 'fix' a piano. The owner had called in a tuner, sometime in the past, and decided they didn't like paying for a tuning every year. Solution? WELD THE TUNING PINS IN PLACE. Yup..a small spot-weld at the base of each tuning pin. A blob of metal from pin to plate. Really special, don't you think? Didn't really weld it, as the tuning pins responded to the hammer right away...but it's the thought that counts, right? Who needs a tuner when you have a welding torch, eh?

20 odd years ago, Bill Spurlock brought pictures of a piano that his customers had asked him to spend as much time as necessary to get the tuning as good as it could be. The next day the customer called up complaining about how horrible the piano sounded. The customer had poured epoxy throughout the webbing to a depth that looked close to 1/4". Wanted to lock those pins in place!

Yesterday,drove 230 miles to get here (been doing this for 32 years now), tuned a beautiful old upright that had been rebuilt (new hammers, strings, tuning pins, dampers, cabinet finish (with decal), etc, tuned a Louis Zwicki chest piano with the tuning pins on top, then two nice little grands. Today will tune 3 spinets and 2 grands. That Zwicki (circa 1955) reminded me of the little autopiano chest pianos they made a hundred years ago except the strings went over the top of the pinblock to VERTICAL tuning pins! Hard to tune with a 90 degree very wide shoulder for each string to go over. I took some pictures. May post them next week when I get home.

Bet you never thought this thread would last or go this long did you Sam?

I've been working at the college all week. I hired another tech to help me do a lot of the repair work. Regulation issues on most of the pianos, fixing the squeaking pedals on the Kawai's etc.. He's doing the repairs while I'm doing the tuning. Well, most of the repairs anyway. Some things just can't wait.

It seems that every couple of months, they are squeaking again. Much of the "creaking" is coming from the backs of the dampers, from the damper felt. I wrote to Kawai 2 weeks ago about it, to Mark Wisner in fact but, so far, no response whatsoever. I sent him a 2nd email, one liner, asking what was up with no response 2 days ago, still nothing.... Wonder what's going on with that?

I got a call from a lady who wanted me to tune and repair her Cable console piano. She said "something was done to it" years ago and it has not worked since then.

When I got to the house, none of the keys would work, which raised my curiosity. I started to raise the lid and the were no hinge pins, so it lifted off in my hands. Opening the piano revealed an action that was not mounted correctly, and there were no nuts on the action mounting bolts. I also see a pedal rod on top of the keys.

I then see that the hammer felt has come unglued on almost every hammer, and some are just the molding, no felt. I remounted the action to see if it would play, and it seemed OK.

I told her the hammers need replaced, and that I would take a sample from the end of each section. Thats when I realize that each end hammer had been taken, with the shank broken off as if 2 pairs of pliers had been used to break the shank. I suppose I'm lucky that the butt is still there, even if the remaining shank is too short to get a grip on.

I explained that I could replace the hammers, but the cost would probably exceed the value of the piano. She ended up choosing to replace the hammers.

I'm curious as to why someone would take hinge pins and action bolt knobs home with them. I do hope the ones I ordered fit the thread pattern of the action bolts.

Your guess is as good as anyone elses Dan. Nobody has the answer to hack work. Hacks promise string replacement yet, they never install them and if they do, it's got 16 coils all running upwards around the tuning pin with the wrong sized universal wire. Poor customer winds up paying up the nose to fix the the stupidity and carelessness from the other tooner.

I tuned an O, an A, two Kawai verticals, a Koller grand, a Bosie grand, and now it's 5:30pm and I'm facing a Whitney spinet, 25 cents flat. The customer says I tuned it just two years ago. My records said 2006. I open the lid, and yep, there is my card with 2006 on it. Raised it 100 cents to 440 then. Customer fail. Of course, it seems like just two years ago. Tunelab to the rescue of a tired tuner, and overpull with my pre-measured "Whitney Spinet" program, and made short work of the pitch raise.

Seven? How about 12? Local solo and ensemble festival in my area, for 5 school districts, would bring pianos from their schools on Friday morning, and expect them all to be perfect by 7AM on Saturday morning. Wheeeeeee! My annual tuning marathon has been taken over by digitals in the practice rooms (....and I won't complain too loudly).

Last week I did tune 9 pianos in a day. But, this was for a store-closing sale and 7 of those were 'floor' tunings. You can't really expect an out-of-the box piano to get a good tuning at one go. So, you do the best you can within a 45-50 minute span, and move to the next.